#text panels

Friday, May 10, 2019

Monday, June 5, 2017

This painting is on display on the saloon wall in the Wellcome Collection's main exhibit. I had an intense reaction to this painting, its absolutely exquisite. I wanted to know more about the painting - what it's name was, who it was depicting, the representation of a black woman as Mary and from that is it modern emulating old or authentically old, who painted it, where could I find more?

The Wellcome collection had a new numbering system running alongside the usual one. At strategic locations artists, curators, academics, arts workers and more had been invited to add a contemporary and personal commentary to the artifacts. Here are some powerful examples around decolonisation. I am also pleased - and Dan was interested too - in the display of 'back of house' work. Seeing the classification and talking about the museum as a workplace with processes and as flawed is brilliant.

The one below was particularly hard hitting for me. It is powerful, I have put the images they refer to under the 'keep reading' so as not to perpetuate the sharing of others cultures for quick consumption, or to 'pretty' my feed. The changing of the titles of the pieces too was particularly brilliant. Recently I attended a session on representing the reality as part of the museum and heritage summer series and Sir Geoff Palmer was talking about how there are no sensitive topics, only the truth. The retitling of 'British tribe member tresspassing' reminds me of that discussion.

Being Human at the Welcome Collection

attended this show with my friend Dan. He said he wanted to see it as he had seen it advertised with the title “being human” and not seen much more information, that had been enough for him. He said that we needed headphones for the experience. We booked tickets (COVID times) and headed down. My initial thoughts were that it would be a show containing pysical human elememnts like biology or pathology or virolology. It kinda didn’t, it was a hodgepodge of many elements - interesting but didn’t seem to have a cohesion. There were natural disaster photos, a flooding McDonalds video, a refugee space man made of textiles and belongings, a blender for ingesting poo incase of extreme dhiorreah, a juke box with pandemic music and more. I suppose the broad sense of being human was encapsula but really you could have taken my house and it’s wears on display and called it being human if that’s the case. That is, of course, reductionist, but I am still a little lost I expected a little more meat from the title. It felt more like a gallery or permenant collection of displays than a limited run show.

This refugee astronaut was thought provoking and also just really pretty. Great combo in my books. I was particularly surprised to find onjects I own (such as old cameras) in the sack on his back. I love that all the text panels featured Braille for accessiblity.

I did very much enjoy the individual displays. These photographs were great, and struck a chord with me due to their similarity to Hackney Flower by Stephen Gill. The text panel was confusing however, it explained that the ’the film was found and then dropped at Euston‘, Dan and myself couldn’t figure out if they meant dropped as in dropped off or

Thursday, February 14, 2019

Wednesday, February 13, 2019

Thursday, September 19, 2018